Wink Silk  ·  Our Story

The Woman Behind Wink Silk

My name is Erin Wise. I am the founder and Creative Director of Wink Silk.

I did not set out to build a luxury silk brand. I set out to survive, and somewhere inside that fight, I found something I needed to make.

I was 44 years old when I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. CLL. Not the kind where they say "watch and wait." Mine came back unmutated IGHV with CD38 positivity, a high-risk molecular profile that meant my cancer was more aggressive, more likely to progress, and required a treatment approach that had to be chosen very carefully. My oncology team had initially planned for FCR chemotherapy, a standard frontline regimen.

But unmutated IGHV changes everything.

FCR chemotherapy in patients with my profile carries significantly higher risk of disease transformation. They pivoted to Venetoclax and Obinutuzumab, V+O, an intensive targeted chemo-immunotherapy designed for high-risk CLL.

Over the next year and a half, I went through that treatment. And throughout that time, the Venetoclax had to be paused. Multiple times. Sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Because I kept getting severe infections, back to back, while my immune system was being dismantled from the inside.

That is not a story of clean triumph. It is a story of fighting, stopping, recovering enough to fight again, and fighting again.

It is the only story I know how to tell.

What Illness Teaches You About Everything You Touch

When your immune system is compromised the way mine was, first by the cancer itself, then by treatment, you develop a different relationship with your environment.

Everything that touches your body becomes a variable.

Fabrics. Dyes. Detergents. Finishes. The things that most people never think about become things you have to think about every single day.

I also developed Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, MCAS, a condition in which the immune system's mast cells fire inappropriately and excessively in response to triggers that would not affect most people. For me, this has meant skin reactions, severe anaphylactic episodes requiring hospitalization, gastrointestinal symptoms, and an immune system that has become, in certain ways, its own worst enemy.

My immunoglobulin levels, the markers of immune memory and antibody function, have remained critically low.

This critically low immune system is called Hypogammaglobulinemia. Almost as many syllables as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but nowhere near as fun to say.

What it means: my body's ability to recognize and defend against threats has been systematically eroded.

I started wearing a mask every time I walked through the house, so I'd never have to ask my kids to wait while I found one. On the hardest nights, the nights I couldn't manage even that, I couldn't be in the same room as my own children at all.

No hugs. No goodnights. Just a closed door, and the sound of them on the other side of it.

The infections that paused my treatment were not bad luck. They were the predictable consequence of what cancer and treatment do to a body's defenses.

And through all of it. Through every hospitalization, every paused infusion, every protocol adjusted and adjusted again, there was this quiet reality that I kept coming back to:

For eight hours every night, whatever I was sleeping on was touching my face, my scalp, my neck. The most sensitive surface on my body.

The place where inflammation shows first and heals last.

Most of those nights, I would have neck sweats too, which meant whatever chemicals were sitting in that fabric weren't just resting against my skin.

They were being driven into it.

My hair, already fragile from treatment, would soak through with sweat overnight, stick to my neck and scalp, and knot into something I'd have to work through strand by strand every morning before I could even get out of bed.

Most pillowcases are processed with chemical finishes, synthetic dyes, or blended with materials that carry allergen risk. Even products marketed as "pure silk" vary enormously in actual quality: momme weight, silk grade, certification status, dye process. I was spending every waking hour managing what went into my body.

And every sleeping hour on something I couldn't fully trust.

That was the problem I decided to solve.

Why Silk. Why This Silk.

I did not choose silk for its glamour, though there is glamour in it.

I chose silk because of its biology. Mulberry silk, true, Grade 6A, 25-momme 100% mulberry silk, is produced from the fibers of the Bombyx mori silkworm and is composed primarily of fibroin, a naturally hypoallergenic protein fiber.

It does not conduct heat the way cotton does. It does not create the friction that synthetic fabrics do. It does not harbor dust mites or microbial growth the way organic cotton can over time.

For skin: silk's smooth surface reduces the repetitive micro-friction that contributes to sleep creases, morning puffiness, and barrier disruption in sensitive or reactive skin.

For women managing eczema, rosacea, contact dermatitis, or post-treatment skin sensitivity, the kind of sensitivity that comes from chemotherapy, targeted therapy, or the immune dysregulation that follows, that friction matters.

Every morning of reduced inflammation is not a small thing. It is a material thing.

For hair: silk pillowcases reduce the mechanical stress that causes breakage, frizz, and cuticle damage. Particularly for women managing chemotherapy-related hair changes, hair loss, or regrowth. The hair that comes back after treatment is fragile and different.

It deserves a different surface.

But not all silk is the same. The silk industry is rife with misrepresentation. Blended fabrics sold as pure, lower momme weights sold as premium, certifications referenced without verification.

I know, because I researched it the way you research something when your health depends on getting it right.

Every specification in Wink Silk traces back to what I needed my pillowcase to be:

• 25-Momme Weight: the threshold at which silk becomes genuinely durable, temperature-regulating, and substantial enough to deliver its full benefits night after night.
• Grade 6A 100% Mulberry Silk: the highest available grade. Tightly constructed, uniformly lustrous, with minimal variation in fiber thickness that would compromise the surface smoothness I needed against my skin.
• GOTS-Certified Organic: the Global Organic Textile Standard, Certificate No. GOTS-16032. Not a label. A verified, audited chain of custody from fiber to finished product, ensuring the silk was processed without synthetic pesticides, prohibited chemical finishes, or the dye compounds most likely to trigger reactive immune systems.
• OEKO-TEX® Standard 100: Certificate BJ025 172302, issued by TESTEX. Tests the finished fabric against more than 1,000 regulated and unregulated chemicals, including the exact compounds most likely to be driven into skin under heat and moisture. The same conditions night sweats create against skin for eight hours at a time.
• Clean Dye Process: including our founding colorway, Coy™, developed in Pantone 7499C. Every color in the Wink Silk palette was selected and developed with dye safety as a primary criterion, not an afterthought.

Momme weight. Grade. Certified fiber origin. Verified chemical safety.

Together, this is what I now call Performance Luxury™ Grade Silk. Not a marketing category.

A checklist.

If a silk pillowcase can't document all four, it doesn't meet it.

This is not luxury for the sake of luxury. This is luxury in its most honest form: the best possible material, made the right way, designed for what the body actually needs.

The Other Half of This Story

I cannot tell Wink Silk's story honestly without telling you about Cooper.

Cooper Wise is my husband. He is the Chief Momentum Officer of Wink Silk, the person who has built every piece of the technical and marketing infrastructure that makes this brand run. But that description does not capture what he actually is to this company, or to me.

Cooper has his own story of what it means to be rebuilt from the inside out.

He survived a rare congenital heart condition as a child that required 2 experimental surgeries to fix. The kind of surgery you don't know is going to work until it does.

He has been through four sleep apnea surgeries. He lost 135 pounds. He recovered from addiction. He has been sober for years. He is a Screen Actors Guild member, a musician, a father of five, and one of the most quietly extraordinary people I know.

His entire philosophy, what he calls Momentary Living, or Momentarianism, with the tagline Stronger by Design, is built on the belief that we are shaped most completely by the moments that nearly break us. That the body, the mind, the character, all of it, can be made stronger by the exact things that were meant to stop it.

Cooper and I have been together for more than 28 years. We built a family, five children, a life, a philosophy, across the full spectrum of what life actually looks like when you live it without flinching.

He built Wink Silk with me the same way he has shown up for everything: completely, and without needing to be asked.

While I was managing infusions and infections and immune panels and MCAS reactions, Cooper was building the infrastructure that would allow me to build something of my own.

Shopify architecture. Brand strategy. Keyword systems. Supply chain. Manufacturer relationships. Certification sourcing. He did not build it for me. He built it with me, because he understood what it meant for me to have something beautiful to build.

That is the marriage behind this brand. And I think it shows.

Building Wink Silk While Still in the Fight

Here is what I want to be honest about, because I am not interested in giving you a version of this story where everything is resolved and I'm standing on the other side of illness telling you what I learned.

I am still in it.

My LDH has been elevated. My immunoglobulin levels remain critically low. The questions around my ongoing immune status, possible disease evolution, and what comes next medically are not answered. I am still being monitored. I am still navigating the intersection of CLL, MCAS, and hypogammaglobulinemia in ways that require specialist coordination and the kind of daily management that has become, simply, part of my life.

I built Wink Silk while still in the fight.

Not because I was finished healing, I haven't been. Not because everything was resolved, it isn't. But because I understood something that serious illness makes very clear:

That is what this brand is. Not a survivor story with a tidy ending.

A living one.

Who Wink Silk Is For

Every product decision we make is made with a specific woman in mind.

She may be managing a chronic illness or autoimmune condition: lupus, MS, fibromyalgia, CLL, MCAS, hypersensitivity disorders, and has learned to be as deliberate about what touches her body as she is about what goes into it.

She may be in active cancer treatment or post-treatment recovery, navigating chemotherapy-related skin sensitivity, hair loss, regrowth, or the residual immune compromise that persists long after the last infusion.

She may have reactive or sensitive skin, eczema, rosacea, contact dermatitis, and has cycled through enough "gentle" products to know that the word means nothing without transparency about what's actually in the fabric.

She may simply be a woman who has decided that the eight hours she spends sleeping are not an afterthought.

That what touches her skin all night deserves the same scrutiny she brings to everything else in her life.

She is the woman we make every decision for.

The Founding Pillowcase

Our founding product is the Douceur Doublure™ pillowcase, a French phrase meaning softness, gentleness, sweetness.

Chosen deliberately.

It is made from 2 layers of 25-momme Grade 6A 100% Mulberry silk. GOTS-certified, Certificate No. GOTS-16032. Available in our founding colorway, Coy™, a soft, luminous warm ivory developed in Pantone 7499C.

Every element of the Douceur Doublure™ was designed from scratch: the momme weight, the grade specification, the certification requirements, the zipper closure (because envelope closures slip; zippers secure), the dye palette, the finish.

Nothing was chosen by default.

This is the product I needed and could not find.

So I made it.

The Wink Silk Promise

A Note on Wink Privé

Wink Silk's membership program, Wink Privé, is built for the women who find us and stay. Members of our community are called Les Siennes, French for "hers," "her own," "belonging to her." Because that is exactly what this space is.

Whether you are managing a health condition, building a sleep ritual, or simply choosing to stop settling for what's available and start insisting on what's right:

You are seen here, and you are welcome here.

Tiers within Wink Privé, Nacre, Souple, Lumière, Privée, Vigueur, Intime, reflect the depth of the relationship, not a hierarchy of worth.

Every woman who comes through this door comes in with her own story.

We are here to honor it.

What We Believe

We believe that sleep is not passive. It is the body's primary act of restoration, and what you sleep on is part of the protocol.

We believe that women managing chronic illness, immune disorders, skin conditions, and cancer treatment deserve access to products designed with their biology as the starting point, not added on afterward as a marketing angle.

We believe that the word organic and the word certified should mean something specific, and we refuse to use them any other way.

We believe that building something beautiful while fighting something hard is not contradiction.

It is the most human thing there is.

And we believe that the woman who has been through the most, the one managing the most, carrying the most, fighting the hardest, deserves to sleep on something extraordinary.

She has earned it.

In ways most people will never know.

One date sits underneath all of this. September 6 is the day Cooper and I began, and the same date, six years later, that he blindfolded me, drove me back to the Spanish classroom where we'd met our junior year of high school, arranged the desks exactly as they had been that day, sat me in the exact seat where he first saw me, and asked me to marry him. It has nothing to do with a launch. It is just the reason there is a company here at all.

Wink Silk was founded by Erin Wise, Founder and Creative Director, and built alongside Cooper Wise, Chief Momentum Officer. We are based in Newport Beach, CA, in the United States. Our silk is sourced from a GOTS-certified manufacturer (Certificate No. GOTS-16032), woven from Grade 6A 100% mulberry silk at 25-momme weight. Wink Privé members get early access on November 4, 2026, with public launch following on November 5, 2026, twenty-four hours later.